Shhhh," Khalif Saed whispers as he looks around the vast, deserted warehouse filled with row upon row of disused weaving machines. "Listen."

What we hear is the sound of nothing, a roaring silence in the stifling heat of the late Egyptian spring in a place that once hummed with activity. A lone dog sleeps in the neighbouring warehouse that is empty of everything but dust, while in the next one, a small cluster of workers operate a few antique machines, dwarfed by the giant, unused equipment around them.

Saed is the head of the Helwan Spinning and Weaving factory's union. The 3000 workers he represents are what remains of the state-owned factory's once 27,000-strong labour force, which produced export-quality linen and clothing made from 100 per cent Egyptian cotton. They now only make products for the local market that in this dire economic climate few can afford to buy, while struggling to raise their families on an average wage of $150 per month, often waiting weeks for their salary to arrive.

"Imagine getting to the end of the month and your pay is not there," Saed says. "Month after month."

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A complicated chain of events is triggered when the pay is late: the workers protest and a letter is sent to the Ministry of Labour, which then applies to the Ministry of Finance for a loan. Some time later, maybe days, maybe weeks, the loan is approved and the workers are paid. And the whole Kafkaesque process begins again.

The factory is a symbol of all that is wrong in Egypt: wilful neglect by a government that long ago relinquished large parts of the state to its people, abandoning the provision of the most basic of civil services, such as garbage collection and community-based policing, while allowing significant state-owned enterprises to collapse. It was this kind of decades-old dysfunction - combined with years of industrial unrest over low wages, high levels of youth unemployment and an oppressive security state - that sowed the seeds of the January 25, 2011 revolution, which overthrew dictator Hosni Mubarak after 30 years in power.

But in the industrial dystopia of Helwan, a city 30 kilometres south of Cairo by the Nile, where giant smoke stacks dominate the skyline and the air is thick with dust, strikes at factories like Helwan Spinning and Weaving have never stopped. No government - not Mubarak's, nor the interim government led by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, nor Mohamed Morsi's Islamist parliament or the interim military-led government now in power - has resolved the issue.

Indeed, rolling stoppages have been crippling the transport, textiles, cement and steel industries, while government workers in the postal, education and health-care sectors - including doctors, dentists and pharmacists - have also been participating in regular labour strikes for months. Poor wages mean many workers remain living below the poverty line.

It is against this chaotic background - and three years and two presidents since the fall of Mubarak -that Egyptians will again go to the polls this week. Yet it is an election in which nobody seems to doubt the outcome. The president-in-waiting, retired general Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, has not taken a backward step since - as head of the armed forces - he forced the Muslim Brotherhood-backed president Mohamed Morsi from power on July 3 last year. Most senior members of the Brotherhood - who were, for a year, at the height of political power in Egypt - are either behind bars and facing charges that attract the death penalty, or living in exile to avoid arrest. "There will be nothing called the Muslim Brotherhood during my tenure," al-Sisi said earlier this month on Egyptian TV.

Meanwhile, most traces of the revolution - with its cry for "bread, freedom and justice" - have been pushed underground. In its place is a police state where all dissent is silenced and the jails are full to bursting.

It is difficult to describe the unique style of dysfunction that grips this nation of 85 million. On the one hand it is constrained by a lumbering, gargantuan bureaucracy staffed by seven million public servants, where computers can be a rare sight, paperwork is done in triplicate and the rules, some left over from British colonial times, seem designed to prevent anything from getting done. On the other, it is unrestrained chaos. In the cities, six lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic squeeze into roads two lanes wide and mountains of garbage spill onto the street, while the majority of Egypt's capital, Cairo, is made up of illegal, informal housing that does not exist on any municipal map.

"It is a country that is in a serious, serious state of disrepair, in which the state has relinquished large sectors of society and has little capacity to carry out reforms, and in which state institutions themselves are the biggest impediment to reform," says Issandr El-Amrani, the North Africa project director at the International Crisis Group (ICG), a non-profit group that works to prevent and resolve deadly conflict. "This is what al-Sisi will face as president, it is what Morsi faced before him - the accumulated neglect of Egypt.

"Most of Cairo as we know it today - 60 per cent of the city - does not exist on any official maps and is therefore not recognised by the government," he says. "It is more or less self-regulating. This is how Egyptians adapt to the failure of a government that has generally abandoned its responsibilities."

Egypt is rated sixth on the global misery index, with unemployment the main contributing factor. The jobless rate is 13 per cent and IMF figures put youth unemployment above 35 per cent, although the real figures are likely much higher. A looming energy crisis and a long, hot summer are expected to trigger further unrest, with daily power cuts already causing havoc in homes and businesses around the country. Central Bank Governor Hisham Ramez said in March that Egypt's foreign debt was $US46 billion, while the Egyptian pound is at its lowest rate since 1990.

In the latest measure of Egypt's progress along its roadmap to democracy, from US advocacy organisation Freedom House, seven out of eight indicators were rated as "stalled" or "backsliding".

"April featured the second mass death sentence in as many months and the banning by the military-led government of a leading liberal activist group, the April 6 Youth Movement," says Vanessa Tucker, vice-president for analysis at Freedom House. "A country in which anyone who criticises the government is sentenced to death or banned from organising is not a country capable of holding free and fair elections."

Riding the wave of a ferocious crackdown in which at least 1300 people were killed in the months following Morsi's ousting last July, Egypt's security forces are more brutal than ever. Striking workers - who played such an important role in the 2011 revolution - are just one target of the repression; virtually no one is spared in Egypt today.

"Police brutality, which was in the past mostly reserved for political cases, has become so generalised," the ICG's El-Amrani warns. Cambridge University political sociologist Hazem Kandil, author of Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen: Egypt's Road to Revolt, says that Egypt has returned to "a police state more vigorous than anything we have seen since [1956-1970 president Gamal Abdel] Nasser".

Kandil says state security was central to Egypt's problems in 2011, and because neither it nor the Ministry of Interior has been restructured, dismantled or reformed in any way, it is central to the problems the country faces now. (The Ministry of Interior did not respond to Fairfax Media's request for an interview.) Yet over the past three years, Kandil adds, many Egyptians have decided they are fed up with revolutions, that it is too chaotic and destabilising. "They would rather have some kind of order, even if the order is repressive and contains the same kinds of structural problems as before, because this is preferable to chaos."

In this security state, paranoia abounds. Conspiracy theories take on a life of their own. The most recent example was broadcast earlier this month on the privately owned al-Tahrir channel. It alleged that a 2001 episode of The Simpsons proved the Syrian uprising was a pre-meditated Western plot. The proof? A flag that looked like that of the Syrian opposition - which was only formed in 2011 - was on one of the trucks in a music video parody that featured in the episode.

On another channel in January, pro-regime presenter Mostafa Bakry called for the murder of US citizens in Egypt over a rumour that the US government planned to assassinate al-Sisi, while in February, al-Tahrir TV aired a "leaked" security services video of the arrest two months earlier of three Al Jazeera journalists in their makeshift offices at the Marriott Hotel.

Set to a dramatic score from the 2011 action film Thor, the video sought to portray as sinister the most basic of journalistic equipment: notebooks, recording equipment and laptops. The three journalists - including Australian Peter Greste - have been in jail since their arrest on December 29 and spend 23 hours a day in a cell three metres by four metres. They are accused of collaborating with the banned Muslim Brotherhood, now designated a terrorist organisation, to falsify news and defame Egypt's reputation. Despite eight days of hearings, the prosecution has yet to present any evidence to support its claims.

Not content with shutting down street protests and jailing more than 16,000 Muslim Brotherhood supporters, as well as unionists, students, academics and journalists, the state has turned its attention to the mosques. In January, the Ministry of Endowments decreed that all imams must follow state-sanctioned themes in their Friday sermons in the country's 84,000 mosques. Supporters say it is a vital step toward stabilising the deeply divided Egyptian society. Others say it is a blatant attempt to cleanse the mosques of the Brotherhood and ensure its power base is forever dulled.

Sheikh Khalif Masoud's Friday sermons used to draw just a few hundred people to al-Montazah Mosque in Cairo's working-class neighbourhood of Imbaba. Today, he says, more than 3000 come to hear his ideas, filling the modest rooms and spilling onto the quiet neighbourhood streets outside.

Closely monitored by Ministry of Endowment officials and state security, the 36-year-old has already been suspended twice for refusing to devote his sermons to government-approved issues. "They want to use imams to sedate the people so they do not protest or oppose the government," he says over glasses of tea in his office in the mosque. "But our society is divided and the wounds are so deep - blood has been shed, people have died and the situation is getting worse every day. The government is worried the mosques could be the one source of truth in a country where there are so many lies."

After criticising the Morsi government's attempts to use religion to control Egyptians, Masoud says the military-backed government is seeking to do the same. A more important question for those in power, he adds, is why so many young Egyptians are leaving the country. "They go for economic reasons and for a higher standard of living, which only come when people have freedom, when they can criticise leaders, and their country can grow into a respectable democratic society."

In August, the ministry removed 12,000 Muslim Brotherhood-connected imams from the system to ensure that "what actually reaches the Egyptian people are real Azhary Islamic values and nothing else", says Mohamed Eid Killiani, the head of public mosques for the Ministry of Endowments. "There was also a decision to unify the sermons on Friday. We did not give them an exact speech, we gave them a list of topics they should stick to because we did not want any political debate from the minaret and we wanted to unify the hearts of the Egyptian people."

The momentum that has driven the last three years of revolution has faded under the intense campaign of repression, says Dalia Abd El-Hameed, a researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR): "There is a shrinking of public space, especially in terms of protests, strikes or any kind of political opposition."

Human rights groups like EIPR have had to narrow their focus, for the moment, to issues such as the epidemic of sexual violence in Egypt and the judicial decisions in two scandalously short trials in March and April. Those recommended mass death sentences for 1905 people for participating in the wave of unrest that wracked Egypt in August 2013, following the ousting of President Morsi. (Some 492 of these people have since had their death sentences reduced to life in prison).

In an important step forward, Egypt's cabinet approved a new anti-sexual harassment law on May 7 that includes a jail sentence and/or a fine for those found guilty of sexual harassment. Yet as society becomes more militarised - almost inevitable with a military-led government - the violence becomes more pronounced and, in turn, disproportionately affects women, El-Hameed says. "We are witnessing a militarisation much more vicious and fierce than after February 2011 [when Mubarak fell] - the level of casualties and deaths are growing, the clashes are becoming more usual, people do not even acknowledge massacres when they take place, and there is no one prosecuting those responsible," she says.

Cairo is now the site of regular hit-and-run bombings, mostly targeting police and security officers, and there's a growing insurgency in the Sinai. The government has blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for the attacks, which have killed up to 500 police and soldiers since last July. The Brotherhood has denied any involvement and another group, the Sinai-based, al-Qaeda-inspired Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, has claimed responsibility for most of the large-scale bombings.

Along with the crackdown on the Brotherhood and those opposed to the government's heavy-handed tactics, security forces also have human-rights groups, journalists and opposition political movements in their sights. All tell a familiar story: they are accused of being spies, or of being members of, funded by or aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood. "Even when there was no opposition, the presence of people in the street represented a huge source of pressure on the government - they were the popular opposition," El-Hameed says. "Today, people want to protest but they are afraid. They want to position themselves away from the Muslim Brotherhood and against the current government, which is a difficult position to articulate."

Most commentators speak of al-Sisi's election as a fait accompli. The former defence chief's only rival is the leftist politician Hamdeen Sabahi, who heads the political coalition, Popular Current, and was an opposition MP during Mubarak's regime.

The two launched their respective election campaigns early this month, with Sabahi seeking to distance himself from al-Sisi's hard-line policies by vowing to abolish the anti-protest law that criminalises most street demonstrations. Expressing his opposition to the military's involvement in politics, Sabahi told al-Nahar TV: "I want to replace the old and failed state that has ruled us for 30 years with a young and successful one. We have cut off two heads of the old regime, but its body and policies are still present."

Meanwhile, the 59-year-old al-Sisi urged voters to stop protesting and striking and instead work hard to save Egypt. "We have a country that is being wrecked ... How can you talk to me about protests?" he said. "I respect the will of the people. But be careful that when you express your will, you don't wreck your nation."

Lina Khatib, director of the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut, says Egypt is enduring "unprecedented political polarisation ... The government's hard-line actions against the opposition are being marketed as an effort to stabilise Egypt, but the reality is that the harsher the actions, the less stable Egypt becomes." Warning that Egypt's economy "is on the verge of collapse", Khatib says Egypt has lost its once-vital, central regional influence and is now a playground for Saudi-Qatari rivalry. "In this political battle, it has become clear that Saudi Arabia has the upper hand, and will continue to influence Egyptian politics into a path favourable to the Kingdom," she says.

In the Helwan Spinning and Weaving factory, cotton-grading department head Mahdi Ramadan Mohamed is despairing. A loyal employee of 25 years, he earns less than $250 per month and says he and his wife struggle to make ends meet for their five girls. "I do not have a car, not even a motorbike for transport," the 47-year-old laments. "I have been trying to build my house for 10 years, but I am getting nowhere."

Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have pledged $US32 billion in aid and have already distributed $US18 billion in an attempt to stabilise Egypt's economy, the ICG's El-Amrani says. But at some point, he warns, "the question will be not whether Egypt is too big to fail - more that it is too big to save".